Commentary on Political Economy

Sunday, 20 November 2011

Heidegger and Weber - Ontology, Science and the Trennung

A lifeless machine is congealed spirit. It
is only this fact that gives

the machine the power to force men to serve it and
thus to rule and

determine their daily working lives, as in fact
happens in factories.

This same congealed spirit is, however, also
embodied in that living

machine
which is represented by bureaucratic organisation with its

specialisation of trained, technical work, its
delimitation of areas of

responsibility, its regulations and its graduated
hierarchy of relations

of
obedience. (M. Weber, Parlament und Regierung)

We saw
in the Nietzschebuch how Nietzsche
unleashes in the Goetzes-Dammerung (Twilight of the Idols) a
pitiless tirade against the “dialecticians” Socrates and Plato who are guilty
in his eyes of seeking to suppress the “self-interested” speculation of the
Sophists against their championing of the “purity” of the “philosopher’s quest
for the “dis-interested and dis-passionate” Truth.
In the earliest clear statement of his own novel quest for a thoroughgoing critique (Nietzsche saw himself as a
“fearless critic”) of “the Will to Truth”, Nietzsche describes in Uber den Wahrheit und Luge how human
beings abandon the Hobbesian bellum
omnium of the state of nature to form the status civilis and by so doing are prompted by “con-venience” – by
the social con-ventum or social contract – to enter into, precisely,
“con-ventions” that by their very “symbolic conventionality” in fact “exclude”
the physio-logical reality of individual needs by “equalizing the unequal”, by
comparing the incomparable. The Will to Truth consists just in this “crystallization” of human reality into
“symbols” such as language, logic and mathematics that consequently come to
replace and “mask” the “intuitive” reality of the individual’s “representation”
(Vorstellung, also “dissimulation”) of his own “self-interest” in the original
state of nature. The merit of the Sophists for Nietzsche is that their
“rhetorical” pursuit of self-interest is a more genuine expression of human
reality than the pretended “dis-interested” dialectical philosophical efforts
of Socrates and his disciples. The Sophists “know” that “the Truth” is a mere
“perspective” and that what matters are the “interests” of human beings – of
the “body”. Socrates and Plato instead absurdly believe in “the real world” and
thereby render it into “a fable”, into “another world” so per-fect as to be unreal and unattainable – the empyrean of
“Platonic Ideas”. It is the “crystallization” of human reality through the
“ontogeny of thought” or “the perspective of the herd”, the dictatorship of
“self-consciousness” that Nietzsche combats vigorously. Between poiesis and
techne, Nietzsche prefers the sensuousness of the latter.

Ernst
Mach begins his magnum opus, Knowledge and Error, by emphasizing exactly this
distinction between the “dis-interested” pursuit of truth by “the scientist”
and the more “mercenary” efforts of the “artisan” interested only in short-term
and “opportunistic” material gains. This “distinction” or “dichotomy” between
the “true pursuit” or “the pursuit of truth” on the part of the philosopher for
the “being of beings” or ontology – the Aristotelian prima philosophia - as
against the “interested” efforts of the Sophists for the utility of “beings”,
for “applied philosophy”, for mere “practical science”, is what Heidegger
condemns in the very opening pages of his imposing Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (lectures delivered in summer of 1928).

The philosopher has [13]

taken upon himself the seriousness of the concept, of
fundamental

questioning. Everything routine, everyday, average
(fallenness) is

the opposite of this endeavor. The sophist, on the
contrary, as rationalizer

and know-it-all, appoints himself to work on human
beings,

persuades them they must worry about one another's

spiritual needs. (pp.12-3)

….

In the direction of this basic problem, the decisive
determination

of human Dasein lies in the insight that that which we
call the

understanding-of-being belongs to Dasein's ontological constitution.

Human Dasein is a being with a kind of being to which
it

belongs essentially to understand something like
being. We call

this the transcendence of Dasein, primal transcendence
(see the

second major part of the lecture course). It is on the
basis of transcendence

that Dasein comports itself to beings, is always
already

thrown onto beings as a whole. (p.16)

….

This fundamental philosophical question about man
remains

prior to every psychology, anthropology, and characterology,
but

also prior to all ethics and sociology. The fact that
the aforementioned

appear wherever this question is more or less
explicitly

alive, and are even taken for essential in its stead,
only demonstrates

one thing: that this question, and with it the basic
problem

of philosophy, is not and never does become easily
accessible. For

this reason also it is constantly threatened by sophistry.
What is

easier than, in a comfortable and interesting way, to
interest a

human being in human beings, to enumerate for him his
complexes,

potentials, standpoints, one-sidedness, and failings,
and to

say this is philosophy? It is crucial that the human
being, in this

sophistical sense, become completely irrelevant in the
rightly understood

fundamental philosophical question about man.
Philosophy

never "busies" itself with man in this
hustling sense in which

man can never take himself to be important enough. (p.17)

….

Thus also the result of a philosophical effort has a character
fundamentally

different from the acquisition of particular sciences.
To

be sure, philosophizing-and it especially-must always
proceed

through a rigorous conceptual knowledge and must
remain in the

medium of that knowledge, but this knowledge is
grasped in its

genuine content only when in such knowledge the whole
of existence

is seized by the root after which philosophy
searches-in

and by freedom. (p.18)

If we
combine these seemingly opposing “perspectives” on the relationship between “knowledge
and human interest”, we will see that in all cases, from Hobbes to Nietzsche
and through to Mach and Heidegger, the essential feature of the negatives Denken (negative thought) is
the utter denial of any inter esse in
human being. From Nietzsche’s
"immanentist" opposition to “crystallized” human con-ventions that “dissimulate” the
antagonism of the Hobbesian feral state of nature, to the Machian “dis-interest”
in the “applications” of scientific experimentation, to the Heideggerian “transcendental”
destitution of the concrete “ontic”
existence of “man” – in all these cases we encounter the unbridgeable “separation”
(Trennung) of human beings from their “being human”, from the concrete
historical and material circum-stances and con-ditions of their “species-conscious”
or “phylogenetic” being.

Even
Weber’s distinction between the Kalkulation
of “sober modern capitalism” and the “opportunistic” nature of its historical
predecessors is based on this notion of the “purity”, of the “spontaneity” of
modern capitalism in its unflinching application of the Rationalisierung to the
“organization of free labor under the regular discipline of the factory”. For
Weber, the Trennung, the “separation” of human beings from the “pro-duction” or
objectification of their own existence is both the sine qua non of “modern
industrial work” – in the sense that it constitutes the “crystallized spirit”
of “the lifeless machine” – and the nec plus ultra of capitalist industry – in the
sense that only because of this “separation” and the “conflict” that it
engenders between all economic agents is the full “rationalization” of
production on the part of the “living machine” of capitalist bureaucratic rule
made possible.

Essentially,
and quite instructively for us, Weber duplicates for his own theory of
capitalism the conditions of the state of nature, the war of all against all,
that Hobbes had “hypothesized” so as to be able to establish “scientifically”
the need for a “convention” by human beings to erect a State-machine that would represent rationally (!) their otherwise ir-reconcilable self-interests!

It is
the feral “conflict” of the “war of all against all” – the Weberian “care for
external goods”, the hypothesized
“iron cage” – that allows the “crystallization” – the convention! – of the “spirit” that is represented jointly by the
“lifeless machine” (the technology adopted to maximize rationally the provision
for “the care for external goods”) and the “living machine”, that is, the
actual living Spirit (Heidegger’s
expression in his doctoral thesis on Duns Scotus) needed “to guide and govern”
the “lifeless machine” and the “free labor” that operates it.

Together,
the “lifeless machine” and the “living machine” merely utilize rationally the
antagonism of self-interests: not a “re-conciliation” but a “decision in extremis, ob metum mortis”. – A decision at once “free” and “unfree”. Heidegger
again:

It is becoming clear that with such problems we are already

immediately in the realm of the question concerning the
constitution

of Dasein's being. Even more, obligation and being governed

by law, in themselves, presuppose freedom as the basis for
their

own possibility. Only what exists as a free being could be
at all

[20] bound by an obligatory lawfulness. Freedom alone can
be the

source of obligation. A basic
pro b lem of logic, the law-governedness

of thinking, reveals itself to be a problem of human

existence in its ground, the problem of freedom. (pp.19-20)

And
here, as in Hobbes, the problem poses itself of how the State-machine can effectually re-present and then “govern”
the self-interests of free labor
involved in the rational operation of the machine . What “legitimacy” can such
a Regierung have, and how can its
“legality” take institutional, parliamentary
form? The next stage of the critical
debate will involve the Hobbesian Carl Schmitt and the Kelsenian Weber.